Thursday, October 31, 2013

The Political TV Commercial as a Pivotal Component in American Presidential Politics and National Leadership by Q Score

Ever since Madison Avenue
advertising man Rosser Reeves convinced Dwight Eisenhower to use him and TV
commercials to run for the presidency in 1952, the political TV commercial has
become a pivotal component in American presidential politics.

Four years earlier Reeves tried to
interest the then Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, in the approach. But
Dewey “did not buy the idea of lowering himself to the commercial environment
of a toothpaste ad,” related Robert Spero in his 1980 book The Duping of the American Voter, Dishonesty & Deception in
Presidential Television Advertising.

The Eisenhower
commercials were coordinated with the campaign’s slogan—“I Like Ike.”

Indeed, one spot featured a song especially
written by Irving Berlin titled “I Like Ike.”

There was an early understanding by
Reeves that television best communicates feeling and emotion, not information. TV,
as media theorists later described it, is a “non-cognitive medium.” Thus the
Eisenhower ads—stressing Eisenhower’s likeability – involved feeling and emotion,
making the strongest use of the TV medium.

I recall, as a kid, seeing the TV
image of Eisenhower back then, grinning.

The intellectual Democrat
candidate, Adlai Stevenson, tried to counter the blitz of 15-second Eisenhower
spots. Stevenson embarked on a series of half-hour TV presentations, reiterating
and expanding on themes he struck in his convention acceptance speech. These
lectures, essentially, didn’t work.

With television, as Joe McGinniss
wrote in his seminal 1969 The Selling of
the President, “it matters less” that a politician “does not have ideas.
His personality is what the viewers want to share. The TV candidate...is
measured...not against a standard of performance established by two centuries
of democracy—but against Mike Douglas. How well does he handle himself? Does he
mumble, does he twitch, does he make me laugh? Do I feel warm inside? Style becomes
substance. The medium is the massage and the masseur gets the votes.”

TV talk show personality Mike Douglas
is dead. But the dynamic McGinniss described continues—indeed has expanded
politically.

As observed Richard Reeves in a
1980 television report, “ABC News Closeup:
Lights, Cameras...Politics,” realizing TV “transmits feelings and emotion
better than it transmits information...media consultants tried to motivate
Americans to vote the same way that they were motivated to buy toothpaste: with
little entertainments.”

He cited as an early example of
this the infamous spot put together in 1964 by Tony Schwartz for Lyndon
Johnson. A little girl plucks petals
from a daisy, counting up to nine and then a man’s voice counts down from ten
to zero—and suddenly the TV screen fills with the super-scary footage of a
hydrogen bomb, and Johnson’s voice states: “The stakes are too high...We must
either love each other or we must die.”

Schwartz later wrote in his book The Responsive Chord: “The task of a
media specialist is not to reveal a candidate’s stand on issues, so much as to
help communicate those personal qualities of a candidate that are likely to win
votes.” This spot and the strong emotion it was designed to impart were aimed
at leaving the viewer feeling that Lyndon Johnson was a person of
responsibility, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, something else.

Further, with this spot, the TV
political attack ad, the emotionally-laden negative political TV commercial,
had arrived—to become a mainstay of election advertising.

By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had become a model
for TV-based presidential TV commercials—and politics. Many voters might have disliked his policies,
but a substantial number “liked” Reagan—based on the image he projected through
television.

With the ability to performing on
television having become a necessary attribute of a presidential candidate, the
Republican Party had chosen an actor to run for president. Reagan had been
governor of California but, importantly, Reagan for eight years before that was
a TV performer, host of General Electric Theatre, after his Hollywood career
hit the skids.

It had come to a point at which Newsday columnist Robert Weimer declared
in 1980: “Why bother with the arduous, uncertain and expensive process of
casting ballots at all? Why not simply put presidential candidates into a
head-to-head, prime-time competition on election night and let the ratings
decide the contest....It’s not hard to understand why the candidates have
settled on television as their main mode of communication. It reaches the most
people with the most impact, even if it does tend to sell only gross
attributes. Audience perception of a smile, for example, can determine the
outcome of a presidential race...Television is essentially a medium that
appeals more to spinal than cerebral receptors. The message that gets through
is spare: Ronald Reagan is affable.”

We can now analyze presidential
candidate after candidate through the prism of political TV commercials and
television performance.

It can be very unsettling.
Consider what was widely described as a great problem for Al Gore when he ran
against George W. Bush in 2000: most folks would rather, it was said, go out
for a beer with Bush than Gore. Gore’s persona as transmitted through TV was
said to be wooden, lacking charisma, Bush somehow connected better. And we got
Bush.

Our current president, Barack
Obama, is a master of performing on television. As Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
complained on Politico this past
February, “The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House
reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends
way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media
personalities. Why bother with The New
York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on ‘The View.’”

And today, television—and particularly
political TV commercials—are vital to the rise and continuancein office of candidates for, not just for
president, but for the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives,
governorships, mayoral positions, and seats in state legislatures and on city
councils.

A political era of dueling
political TV commercials is firmly here.

Meanwhile, the notion of the “Q Score”
or “Q rating” has arrived.

The term “Q Score” was coined in
1963 by Jack Landis who founded a company Marketing Evaluations, Inc. in
Roslyn, N.Y. which continues to use the concept as the central measure in its
opinion polling and market research work. “Q rating”—defined by Merriam-Webster
as a “scale measuring the popularity of a person or thing”—is said by those
dictionary people as having its “first known use” in 1977.

They mean roughly the same: they’re
measures of likeability. They are the standard for how TV reporters keep their
jobs these days, why TV programs are renewed, how products are promoted as well
as how would-be holders of the presidency and other offices in the U.S.—and
increasingly leaders in nations around the world—are selected.

The basis for “I Like Ike” is now
widely applied.

And we are left to wonder what
kind of “Q Score” or “Q rating” Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson might have
had?What have we lost—and what have we
gained?

About Me

I have specialized in doing investigative reporting in a variety of media for more than 45 years. I teach as well as practice journalism. I'm a full professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury where my courses include Investigative Reporting. My website is at www.karlgrossman.com. For over 20 years I've hosted the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up and have written and presented TV documentaries for EnviroVideo (www.envirovideo.com). I'm the chief investigative reporter for WVVH-TV (www.wvvh.com}. I'm the author of six books including "Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power;" "Power Crazy;" and "The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet." Honors I've received for journalism include the George Polk, Generoso Pope, James Aronson and John Peter Zenger Awards. My weekly column runs in newspapers of the Press Newspaper Group and other papers. I have given presentations in the U.S. and around the world and am represented in lecture appearances by MacRae Speakers & Entertainment(macraespeakers.com).